A Dungeon Masters Guide to Suspense

Many Dungeon Masters are good Dungeon Masters. They can run a game, get creative and take you from monster, to trap, to puzzle and back again. They understand the players needs and are not overzealous with the rules... Though in spite of this, after two hours of dungeon crawling their players begin to yawn, fidget and look at their mobile phones. 

At this point the Dungeon Master has failed. They have lost the players. Totally disengaged from the DMs world that has taken some of the more committed months to craft. 

So where did they go wrong? 

Alfred Hitchcock once famously said:

once they've seen it, nobody fears the monster.

A great Dungeon Master must add mystery and suspense to all of the scenes that lead up to an encounter.

But what is suspense? And how do you create suspense in your story? 

Building tension as you Dungeon Master a game is vital to keeping your players, not just engaged, but invested in the plot. 

A great Dungeon Master uses monster encounters rarely. Instead they add tension between the NCPs through characterization. Just as the story has an arch or plot, so must the characters your players encounter. This fleshes them out, makes them real - and the way to do this is you add emotion to their motives.

If you raise the stakes you build tension. Tense players make the best players, you want them to get all of the feels when an NCP fails or is placed face to face with the monster that killed their loved ones.

A dungeon Masters job is to build it up through investigation, plot journeys and the development of seamless narrative. Great Dungeon Masters know to keep such encounters nothing short of epic. The players should be on the edge of their seats when they enter that cave or partake on the evenings watch at the city gate. Slowing down your rhetoric helps, as does adding some suspenseful music. Try dimming the lights and adding candles. One of the best techniques is to practice in front of the mirror. Build the story slowly...

Then....

When you're good and ready......

The enemy is revealed.